The Mortality Files- A Surface Dweller's Tale

In my world, everybody gets the shots, and I was no exception. The difference for me was that I was born in a particular year-- a year when certain mistakes were made-- when some of us got jabbed with shots that didn't work, and hardly changed any of our body's code.

Those of us who were born during that particular time, as it turns out, didn't receive the terminator code that would have shortened our lifespans like everyone else; to about 80 years.

Livestock, All of Us

Our owners have simply tampered with the codes of our bodies so that the self-healing devices in our systems are disabled after a certain time period. This has been going on for a number of generations. One time our owners messed up the formula for the injections that all children received, and those children got a shot, but their natural codes were hardly affected by the dud experimental electro-chemical injection. I was one of those kids.

It's really just business.

I know that my owners don't want me to live long. When I was born, my Birth Certificate was scheduled to cash out within around 80 years or less, like everyone else. I'm a resource, like all of us are, and the 80-year plan is just a business model, based on the life expectancy of previous generations.

Even as the life expectancy of humans was increasing dramatically every year, the business model called for an 80 year contract on the Birth Certificate of anyone, and it was nothing personal, it was just business to administer these mortal terminator programs into the biology of the newborns in my world.

Mortality- It's Just Business

In the years before I was born, there were great changes going on in the basic human biological unit. Each new generation was living longer than their predecessors, and the change was incrementally accelerating, an increase that was messing up the books for our owners. In those days, instead of humans living only about 70 years of age, it became more common for people to live up to 90 years easily, which made our owners quite unhappy.

Unable to cash out our Birth Certificates until the human biological unit is deceased, our owners desperately needed to invent new injections, since the old formula was so obviously failing-- people were living too long.

I Did the Math

I was born in a year when the average life-expectancy of a human was around 70 years of age. At the incremental rate that such life-expectancy was increasing, I could calculate that by the time I reached 70 years, people would routinely live to be 100 years old, and by the time I reached 90, the average age of death would be around 120 years. By the time I reached 120, the life expectancy of humans would have increased to 150, and etc, etc.

I think it's pretty cool, but this notion is scaring my owners-- it's not about the money for them at this point, it's that I could, in time, possibly live long enough to acquire enough knowledge to rival their own god-like powers. And it's not just me, it would include every other being of my age who had managed to avoid those electro-chemical modifications that came with the shots.

It means that there is a small army of us 'immortals' on the planet right now, gaining knowledge and power all the time.

I didn't ask for this special immortality. Who wants to live forever? Haven't even the great yogis all just said "meh" at some time?

It's been said that there are about 7 million of us freaks out there, probably more. Right from the beginning we were easy to spot; we couldn't seem to fit into any groups, and we often spewed our kooky imaginations into the crowd, making everyone uncomfortable.

It wasn't easy being one of the freaks. The adults tried to make me fit in for a few years, but eventually gave it up. They signed me up to play baseball, and I was told to go stand in the grass by the fence in a spot called 'right field' while my team kept their eyes on the ball. The clover patch that I stood in was noisy with honeybees, while neither I nor the bees knew how to play baseball at all.

The adults all pretended like I looked normal in my over-sized cap and baseball uniform, and I pretended to understand the game as I waited for the baseball players on my team to come see the bees and smell the clover.

Baseball was not my game though. They thought I was a weirdo! My old coach-- a grown man devoted to teaching boys to throw a ball around in the grass, ignoring the bees and clover, thought that I was the weird one! The coach didn't want to grow up, obviously, and didn't have to-- he was part of a society that paid him to wear a clunky baseball cap to work, and to throw balls around all summer.

Meanwhile, in right field, the sound of a distant lawnmower and the lull of the air conditioner at the park's concession stand, and the buzz of the bees was enchanting me. How many more innings would I stand in right field, I was never sure, and indeed it was the aged coach who seemed to be keen to such things, telling us when the end of the game was near with an urgent bark.

Over time, I still found myself standing in patches of clover or laying back in the grass, but more often I found myself thinking about a distant game. What was a right-fielder like me supposed to do with my time?

Managed From the Planet's Interior

Maybe I should explain our 'owners' before I go into this next part. Our owners live inside of the planet, while the rest of us live on the surface here, brutalized by the sun and seasons. Time actually moves considerably slower in there next to the central mass, just as clocks here on the surface tick slightly slower than a clock in an airplane, comparatively.

Their proximity to the gravitational mass of the planet allows our owners to live much longer than us surface-dwellers, so that many generations of surface humans will typically come and go while the same management teams from the interior have only experienced a few years.

Funnily, I've run out of time today, so in a future installment I'll describe how it was that I decided to find a way into the interior of the planet to meet these 'owners' personally. I had plenty of time then.

Part 2,

Part 3.

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